Category: Blog

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Employee leaving? What should you do about their email account?

email iconI highly recommend that if an employee leaves the company that you do NOT immediately delete their email account.

You should:
• change out the password
• consider backing up / archiving their email and contacts.
• set an “out of office” type message at the server level to tell people who they should now contact at your company.

Sample wording for an automated response message:

“Sue has moved on to another company and we wish her luck! Your new sales representative is Bob and he can be contacted at: bobsemail@companyname.com & 888-000-0000 ext 123 – We know you’re used to Sue so if needed, Bob would be happy to set up a meeting to get up to speed with your orders or simply get to know you better.”

Another thing to consider is being more proactive by immediately following up with all known contacts to let them know of this change. This may not catch everyone which is why I would still recommend the “out of office” type automated response message.

You should also consider leaving the old employee’s email account active for several months to a little over a year. Some things to consider when deciding how long to keep that email account active / an automated response active:
• how long they worked at the company.
• how important the employee’s contact’s might have been.
• how often people might regularly be in touch is another factor (annual order vs monthly order.)

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Your location privacy and photos from smartphones

I’m seeing a video go around about your photos from smartphones posing a privacy risk.  This video was published back in 2010 and many of the social networks have since started removing this location data from photos as they are uploaded because of this privacy concern. HOWEVER….

HOWEVER what I DO want to point out is that this might not be the case if you are uploading photos to your business websites and other places on the web.

Before any of my clients panic – I do have you covered (no need to change your phone settings) because there are ways to remove this data when being uploaded to a website as well.

This isn’t as big a deal if your business address is published and you’re taking photos at that location, but what if, for example, you are an artist taking photos of your art in your home studio? Or maybe you even simply took some products home to photograph?

For WordPress there are several plugins but my favorite is Smushit because it ALSO reduces file size and increases performance: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

Related Testing Tools: For anyone interested in checking to see if their website photos are showing their location, the data talked about in this video is called “Exif data” and there are browser plugins that allow you to check to see what information is showing on your photos.

To make sure the tool you are using shows Geo Location Exif data, here’s a photo you can test with: http://www.summitpost.org/test-this-image-contains-exif-data/769474

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Yoast SEO with JetPack Publicize –
don’t forget to set the default meta description

The WordPress JetPack plugin allows you to publish blog posts to a variety of social media sites. As a designer I tend to customize my meta description per post but I had forgotten to set a default meta description for a client in the Yoast SEO plugin. This is not only an important setting for SEO reasons but also for how posts can show up when they go to facebook or anywhere else that uses the description meta data.

the importance of meta descriptions and facebookYou can see in the “old” post that facebook grabbed the first text it saw which was associated with the comment field without the default meta description.

In the new post, the default meta description had been changed out so that if the client didn’t create a custom meta description for the post, it would at least show the default which is nicer.

And as my client put it, with no default meta description, it looks like “my petticoats (are) showing!”

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Scheduled Facebook posts / Twitter Tweets

A great easy example of how I use scheduled facebook posts / tweets using hootsuite would be for the Southland Association and Southland Jamboree as pictured.

Hootsuite scheduled posts / tweets

I agree that not all posts/tweets should be automated but there is also a time and place for automation. Some social media experts would argue with me on this because social media should be social! I agree, but that doesn’t mean you can’t automate certain things!

You DO need to remember that you scheduled posts and adjust where needed. Example scenario: rained-out outdoor event. If you know early enough you should delete the automated post and post about the cancelation.

If say you aren’t sure, it might be wise to add a post about when the rain-out will be called. Example: “We’ll post by 6pm whether the event is rained out or you should bring your rain boots with your chair to catch some great bluegrass music!”

Scheduling can be a great tool, just don’t abuse it. 🙂

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Logo Trademark Takeaways

There’s a lot of talk right now in Lexington about trademarks because a local brewery has a larger brewery going after them.

I figured this might be a good time to dig out an old article that’s very relevant regarding logos and trademarks:
http://www.creativepro.com/article/sometimes-a-logo-is-just-a-logo

Some key trademark takeaways from the article:

  • a trademark in one category does not necessarily provide protection in another category, especially if there is little or no overlap in the goods or services.
  • The main concept at work in trademark law is likelihood of confusion.
  • In very high-profile cases, with brands like Apple or Nike, there is another concept at work, that of dilution.
  • Many identities that face infringement issues are those with a simple graphic symbol, often a geometric shape, slapped up next to a simple type treatment of the name.

Trademark Takeaways

If you were a graphic designer back in 2005 you probably remember the interesting conversations being had because of a high profile company, Quark, doing a logo redesign that ended up looking like many other logos already in existence. Being used in other industries of course but it still created a lot of valuable discussion on the topic of logos and trademarks.

 

Related to the local debate (external links):

  1. Independent Brewers United says they own sixes and nines: http://boingboing.net/2013/05/22/independent-brewers-united-say.html
  2. Magic Hat lawsuit: Social media explodes after legal challenge that 6 is 9: http://www.aceweekly.com/2013/05/magic-hat-lawsuit-social-media-explodes-after-legal-challenge-that-6-is-9/

 

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Great Diagram of How Merchant Services works

Step-1

Recently I started the process of setting up a merchant services account. However Authorize.net’s standalone reseller page mislead me into believing they were packaging together the merchant gateway with the processor which I thought was an excellent deal. However, I quickly realized that this was not the case when I started being led through payment processor applications finalized with lists of more fees.

Authorize.net’s main website clearly depicts however, they are only the gateway service so you will also need a payment processor, it’s just the standalone reseller pages that don’t clearly depict the services offered. Which is where I found this excellent diagram of the payment process.

There are a few merchant service providers out there that do in fact package processing and gateway together, but they don’t always work with all ecommerce systems. Authorize.net is still one of the most universal payment gateways available for online. Just keep in mind that they are only part of the equation and without other components, they can’t process credit cards for you.

Click the below thumbnails for a tour of the process. The “Authorize.net” icon in the graphic can be replaced with “Merchant Gateway” as the same process occurs for other ecommerce transactions.

Source: http://www.authorize.net/resources/howitworksdiagram/

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Local Search ecosystem chart

Local Search is an important part of developing a good search engine marketing plan for many businesses.

Local search is especially important for small businesses and locally owned business that rely on a lot of walk-in customers. For example: restaurants, hair salons, co-op groceries, home decor, chiropractors and gift shops just to name a few.

This is a great chart showing the connections between various local search resources.

local_search_ecosystem downloaded March 2013

Source: http://getlisted.org/resources/local_search_ecosystem.pdf